what's in a name?

i laugh when i think of how little we can actually understand. try to think of everything you know, try to recongnize everything you see around you and soon you'll realize that you could probably grasp only 4 or 5 things at a time. our minds work on a flashcard mentality. i say chair, desk, apple, and images almost instantly pop into your head. but if i say infinity, consciousness, reality and suddenly the pictures become more abstract and harder to grab on to. so what's in a name? apparently everything. who you are, what you are, where you are, all the answers are names labels in a world of definitions. the first thing you're given when your born (probably before that) is a name. a name not choosen by you but given to you for you to add meaning to. 

i've caught some flak by using the username icarusincarnate and i guess for my first blog it makes sense for me to give my meaning for the name.  i've used it as a username or email or whatever because the character of icarus had an impact on my life since i was little.  when i was ten i (admittedly stupidly) jumped into the deep end of a pool trying to teach myself how to swim. after i was in the water i relized i couldn't swim and sank rather non-gracefully to the bottom and blacked out. from what i understand the life guard pulled me out tried to give me cpr but it didn't work. so they took me to the hospital did the whole ER thing and an hour later my heart started beating again. i was a kid so it was traumatic and i didn't cope with it very well. i had a mental breakdown and they eventually diagnosed me schizophrienic. about a year of treatment and begging i was allowed to go back to school. so i'm back in school and we end up having to do a project about the death of famous mythological characters. which today wouldn't be a problem but then i had an overwhelming fear of death which of course caused me problems. but i was assigned the story of icarus and took from it my  own interpretation which actually helped me move past my fear of death. in contrast today i probably do more dangerous things than the average person. i guess i do it more for the reasons icarus did but i'm hoping it doesn't meet with the same end because it would really suck to die early twice.